The Hotline reports:

In the Senate, Republican internal polling shows George Allen up, Jim Talent and Bob Corker up slightly, Conrad Burns picking up Republican votes and narrowing the gap with Jon Tester. (Democratic internal polling shows Burns down six; Ford up, Webb up, and McCaskill up).

This has never made much sense to me. Why do candidate or party internal polls always seem to favor the candidate or party paying for the poll?

Seems to me that if I were a candidate in a tight race, I’d want to spend money on polls that give me an accurate depiction of where I’m at — even if it’s bad news — so I can properly stragerize, as our fair president might put it. The last thing I’d want to do is spend ten grand on a poll that blows smoke up my ass, and gives me a false sense of where the electorate actually stands.

I suppose the cynical explanation for all of this is that campaigns actually do get accurate numbers. That is, they have two sets of “internal poll numbers,” one that provides an accurate portrayal of where things stand for purposes of campign strategy, and one they give to media outlets like The Hotline to project confidence.

Of course, if that’s what’s behind Karl Rove’s odd optimism of late, you gotta’ think there’s a good chance it’ll backfire. As Election Day approaches, I’m thinking I want my voters thinking there’s a good chance the party will lose control of Congress — that every vote is critical. I don’t see how “no worries, we’ve got this locked up” gets people to the polls.

But then, Karl Rove gets paid obscene amounts of money for this kind of thing. I don’t.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 7:28 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.